Friday, September 1, 2017

We call Mysophobia to the pathological fear some people feel about germs, dirt and pollution. It´s very easy to identify them because they use to develop a series of obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD). We are talking about behaviors such as washing their hands in a compulsive way, not touching objects without wearing gloves... Those who suffer this phobia use to live terrified, fearing germs and thinking they are going to put and end to their health, and in many cases they en isolating themselves from society.

We confess it, we a a little bit digital mysophobous. We don´t isolate ourselves (what would we do without our beloved Internet?), but we have developed a total repulsion for all kind of digital bugs and germs which want our data. Today, in our best of the week review, we are going to show you some of these new malware that so many rejection provoke in us.

This Monday we discovered a new ransomware in the city. After WannaCry and NotPetya we met Defray. With all these attack waves on the last months it´s easy to think companies have prepared themselves against this kind of menaces, havren´t they? Nevertheless, reality always outdoes fiction and this little bug was able to infect (again) Lanarkshire´s National Hospital.

And from Lanarkshire we go directly to the other side of the world, to South Korea. There is where McAffe discovered a new phishing called MoqHao that only attack Android users. It´s modus operandi is quite simple: The attacker sends a SMS containing a link supposedly linked to a Chrome update or to a private picture. And many users still fall in this trap...

And if we had not enough with cybercriminals spreading their epidemics throughout the web, there are also some "good Samaritans" offering free trojans to everybody willing to obtain one. Or at least, that´s what they would have us believe. It´s Cobian RAT case, a trojan easily founded by free with all its technical specifications. What nobody could expect was that the author had an ace up his sleeve, being able to take control over the hijacked device whenever he wanted to. Cheap can be costly.

While it is true that the web is infected with malware, there are also agents that fight day by day to keep the cyberstreets free clean and safe. That´s why when we knew that many security firms joined forces to put and end to a menace, we can just salute the initiative. In this case, the objective was WireX, a botnet which is scrambling Android users wit its DDoS attacks.

With all this malware travelling around the web and with our digital and chronic mysophobia, we could think that it would be better not to touch any web connected device. But isolating ourselves is not a solution, so we must be cautious. It´s worth to remember that when we go out to the web for gossip, it´s better to wear a good pair of digital protecting gloves, and we can oly achieve that by being well informed and acting with caution.